Is Obama planning a moment of “national healing” for Kermit Gosnell’s victims?

posted at 1:42 pm on March 21, 2013 by Allahpundit

There’s not much to add to John Sexton’s piece. I just want to give it a more prominent place than sticking it in Headlines.

President Obama has made a habit of offering words of comfort when tragedy occurs, especially tragedy that involves children. He traveled to Tucson and spoke movingly of the 9 year old girl who was killed by Jared Loughner. He had great compassion for the young victims of Adam Lanza and promised to work to change the laws that, he claimed, allowed those killings to take place.

So where is Obama on the 7 infants killed in Philly (really it’s many, many times that number)? Why are there no teachable moments this time? Why no national dialogue about the grim reality of late term abortion? No discussion of the razor thin line between constitutional rights and murder from the First Lawyer. No vow to prevent this happening again by banning scissors or, more to the point, working to eradicate illegal late-term abortions (which like gun crimes are already illegal but still happen). Don’t Gosnell’s victims deserve a vote?

The President will not offer nationally televised words of healing at any of the funerals (complete with souvenir t-shirt). He will not stare into the rafters, pause dramatically and stage whisper something about Kermit Gosnell failing to live up to our best ideals. In short, he will not capitalize on the deaths of these innocent children. And no one in the media seems to have noticed his unusual disinterest in doing so…

The President himself voted to defended partial-birth abortion, which is one technicality away from the crimes Gosnell committed. Given all this, shouldn’t the President at least be asked to comment? Even if he wants to remain silent, for obvious reasons, how can the media allow him to do so?

Excellent points all, but we’re forgetting that liberal failures can only be cured with liberal solutions. Once ObamaCare spirals out of control, the left’s proposed solution won’t be repeal, it’ll be “Medicare for all” or some other variation on single-payer. If the assault-weapons ban passed and inevitably didn’t do much to reduce gun violence or mass shootings, the proposed solution wouldn’t be repeal, it would be a ban on a wider class of semiautomatics. Put O on the spot by asking him about Gosnell, and what’ll he say? That it’s time to rethink policies that have so devalued life in the womb that Gosnell could cut a baby’s spine while joking about how big it was? Of course not. His answer will be that we need to make sure abortion is widely available (and culturally acceptable, although that’ll be only implied) so that women never have to visit a butcher like Gosnell. If anything we need more clinics by reputable doctors so that babies can be killed earlier in development, through “humane” means. As Mark Steyn noted yesterday, the few news outlets that are covering this are sufficiently confused about the morality or immorality of what Gosnell did that they’ve taken to describing the live-born babies he’s accused of murdering as “viable fetuses” and noting, drily, that “Abortions are typically performed in utero.” What’s the term for an “atypical” abortion performed outside the womb? Is there a one- or two-day “grace period” after birth where slitting the baby’s throat in its crib still technically counts as “abortion,” not murder? Part of me wants to hear how Obama would field that one, and another part of me really doesn’t.

But needless to say, no, there won’t be any “national healing” for Gosnell’s victims. Anything that’s potentially unhelpful to the pro-choice cause is something he’ll be staying far, far away from, no matter how unexceptional in theory a denunciation of murdering live-born crying infants should be from the country’s chief law enforcement officer. Exit question: Assuming the charges prove true, will Gosnell get the death penalty or not? If it were “just” one or two babies he killed, I’d bet heavily on life in prison. But maybe the sheer scale here — Sexton notes that the number of potential victims could run into the dozens or hundreds — will require a recognition of the value of infant life that’s a bit more robust than usual.

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